Aspects of the present invention relate to tag clouds, and more particularly to a method, system and computer program product for managing tags in a tag cloud.
Tag clouds have become a common collaborative instrument to capture metadata about an object, such as for example, a news article, webpage, multimedia presentation or similar items. A tag cloud is a visual representation for text data. A tag cloud may be a visually representation of user-generated tags. Tag clouds may be used to describe the content of a website. The tags are usually single words and are normally listed alphabetically. An importance of the tag or popularity may be illustrated by a font size of the tag and/or color of the tag. This formatting is useful for quickly perceiving the most prominent terms and for locating a term to determine its relative prominence. When used as website navigation aids, the tags may be hyperlinked to items or objects associated with the tag. Tag clouds, however, are ineffective in capturing the changing nature of an object or objects within a website or webpage. FIG. 1 is an example of a prior art tag cloud 100 in which a group of users have tagged a webpage (not shown in FIG. 1). User A may tag an element or object in the website as “start”. User B may also tag the element or object in the website “start”. Accordingly, the tag “start” is depicted in the tag cloud 100 with a larger size or more prominently than other tags with a lower frequency of use or application to the webpage. As time passes, the nature of the webpage changes. However, the tag cloud remains the same. If a user C tags the element “STOP”, other viewers may not recognize the “STOP” tag as the more relevant or more important tag because of the weight or size of the “STOP” tag relative to the “start” tag. Thus, there is a need to manage tags within a tag cloud as conditions or the webpage changes.